Virtual Methods

Notes
Doing Anthropology in Cyberspace • 155
1. The research was conducted from 1998 to 2000 during my master’s degree in
Social Anthropology at PPGAS/UFSC, Florianópolis, Brazil. Its outcomes
are in my MA dissertation ‘Living at the Palace: The Ethnography of a Social
Environment in Cyberspace’ (Guimarães 2000a) as well as in some papers
(Guimarães 1999, 2000b). The project was funded by CNPq.
2. ‘Multimedia sociability platform’ is used here to refer to software for communication
in cyberspace that employs not only text-based resources but also
audio, video, graphics and avatars. The distinction between environments and
platforms is discussed later.
3. On the user side, The Palace requires the download of a client program that
connects to the servers. At the time of the fieldwork a plug-in for web
browsers was being developed, although this did not get much attention from
the users and never achieved widespread use.
4. The software recognizes four categories of users: Guests, who can only chat
but cannot change the appearance of their avatars or even choose their nicknames,
Members, who can change their avatars, Gods, the server’s managers,
who can configure the rooms as well as moderate the interaction in the environment
through disciplinary measures and Wizards whose role is to control
the behaviour in the servers and have almost as many powers as the Gods.
5. It was found that users not only employ the resources provided by the platforms
in order to collectively elaborate their culture but also transform and
resignify those resources in ways often unforeseen by the applications’ developers.
These boundary negotiation processes between users and developers
and the implications for online embodiment and personhood are the subject
of the project ‘Avatars: Technologies of Embodiment in Cyberspace’
(Guimarães 2002, 2003).
6. The Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (http://www.ascusc.org/
jcmc/index.html, accessed 16 February 2004), for instance, has a specific issue
about online performance (vol. 2, issue 4 1997). See also Danet (2001) for a very
comprehensive analysis of performative use of text in online communication.
7. Despite the fact that a philosophically informed discussion about the ‘reality’
of online experience is fascinating, it by far exceeds the limits of this chapter.
8. This move is also made by other scholars such as Jones (1995), Watson
(1997), Wellman and Gulia (1999), among others.
9. In this chapter it is not possible to review this discussion in detail.
10. The theoretical development of this argument follows the references of
Brazilian Urban Anthropology, which has a relatively long tradition of anthropological
reflection in complex societies. Unfortunately, it is not possible to
develop this discussion here.